Archive for the 'Features' Category

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Overcoming the conspiracy against Palestine

Published on July 20, 2007

Ali Abunimah

“Be certain that Yasser Arafat’s final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as well that … the promises I made in front of President Bush, I will give my life to keep.” Those words were written by the Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose US- and Israeli-backed forces were routed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, in a 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz and published on Hamas’ website on 4 July this year.

Dahlan, who despite his failure to hold Gaza, remains a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, outlines his conspiracy to overthrow Arafat, destroy Palestinian institutions and replace them with a quisling leadership subservient to Israel. Dahlan writes of his fear that Arafat would convene the Palestinian legislative council and ask it to withdraw confidence from then prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who had been appointed earlier in 2003 at Bush’s insistence in order to curb Arafat’s influence. Dahlan wrote that “complete coordination and cooperation by all” was needed to prevent this, as well as “subjecting [Arafat] to pressure so that he cannot carry out this step.” Dahlan reveals that “we have already begun attempts to polarize the views of many legislative council members by intimidation and temptation so that they will be on our side and not his [Arafat's].”

Dahlan closes his letter to Mofaz saying, “it remains only for me to convey my gratitude to you and the prime minister [Ariel Sharon] for your continued confidence in us, and to you all respect.”

This letter is a small but vivid piece of evidence to add to the existing mountain, of the conspiracy in which the Abbas leadership is involved. In the month since Abbas’ appointment of a Vichy-style “emergency government” headed by Salam Fayad, historic Fatah leaders, such as Farouq Qaddumi and Hani al-Hassan have signalled their opposition to Abbas’ actions, specifically rejecting his order that Palestinian resistance fighters disarm while Israeli occupation continues unchallenged.

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The follies of US policy in Palestine

Published on June 29, 2007

Jeffrey D. Sachs

American foreign policy in the Middle East experienced yet another major setback this month, when Hamas, whose Palestinian government the United States had tried to isolate, routed the rival Fateh movement in Gaza. In response, Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, making life even more unbearable in a place wracked by violence, poverty and despair.

It is important that we recognise the source of America’s failure, because it keeps recurring, making peace between Israel and Palestine more difficult. The roots of failure lie in the US and Israeli governments’ belief that military force and financial repression can lead to peace on their terms, rather than accepting a compromise on terms that the Middle East, the rest of the world and, crucially, most Israelis and Palestinians, accepted long ago.

For 40 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been one realistic possibility for peace: Israel’s return to its pre-1967 borders, combined with viable economic conditions for a Palestinian state, including access to trade routes, water supplies and other essential needs.

With small and mutually acceptable adjustments to those borders, these terms would enable peaceful co-existence of two states side by side. Perhaps three-fourths of both Israelis and Palestinians support this “land for peace” compromise, while one-fourth holds out for complete victory over the other side.

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Open letter to Tony Blair on the Middle East

Published on June 28, 2007

By Tim Butcher, Middle East Correspondent

Dear Mr Blair,

The last two international peace envoys to the Middle East – Alvaro de Soto who represented the United Nations and James Wolfensohn who represented the UN plus others – shared one thing in common.

They both quit, driven crazy by the job.

In the spirit of finding a way for you to avoid the same fate, I write with what I hope are helpful suggestions about your new post-Premiership role as Middle East envoy.

First, you are going to have to change. As a prime minister who came to power through media spin and who was never shy to appear in front of camera, you are going to have to learn to embrace silence.

The issues are too complex and the egos of the regional leaders, Arab and Israeli, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, too delicate for you to feed half-digested gobbets of news each day to the world’s media.

You will have to learn that in the Middle East patience not profile is a blessing.

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Divide and rule, Israeli style

Published on June 27, 2007

Jonathan Cook

The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas’ recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. “Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary … Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure.”

But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.

The problem with Levy’s analysis is that it assumes that Israel and the US wanted sanctions to bring about the fall of Hamas, either by giving Fatah the upper hand so that it could deal a knockout blow to the Palestinian government, or by inciting ordinary Palestinians to rise up and demand that their earlier electoral decision be reversed and Fatah reinstalled. In short, Levy, like most observers, assumes that the policy was designed to enforce regime change.

But what if that was not the point of the sanctions? And if so, what goals were Israel and the US pursuing?

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Paying the price of double standards

Published on June 22, 2007

Rami G. Khouri

It’s hard to know who appears more ludicrous and despicable, the Palestinian Fateh and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the “moderates” in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Thursday to underline American support for “moderates” committed to a negotiated peace with Israel, such as President Abbas. She also called leaders of “moderate” Arab states to rally their support for Abbas against Hamas. Surrealistically, this was happening when Hamas forces were routing Fateh’s security forces to take control of all public facilities in Gaza, and President Abbas was proving that the sort of Arab “moderation” he represents has little anchorage in reality any more, and little credibility with its own people above all.

Abbas declared a state of emergency Thursday and dismissed the Palestinian government, but the facts on the ground are that the Palestinian government is a fiction, and his state of emergency is a state of imagination. The “moderation” of Abbas and his Fateh movement was a noble nationalistic cause three decades ago. But Fateh’s own incompetence and creeping corruption — especially after taking control of the West Bank and Gaza after the Oslo accords of 1993 — have turned the movement into an embarrassment that is little more than a pathetic poster child and crippled errand boy for the American State Department.

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